Molecular Structure Determination on a Computational and Data Grid - Parallel Computing for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology - page 596

24.5.4 Dynamic Integration of Resources
The ACDC-Grid introduced the concept of dynamic resource allocation during the
GRID3 intensive application period during Supercomputing 2003 and Supercomput-
ing 2004. The amount of computational resources provided to the GRID3 user base
was dynamically rolled into and out of production on a daily basis. As a proof of
concept, for a 2-week period, 400 processors of a 600 processor Pentium4 cluster
were rolled out of the local CCR pool of resources and into the GRID3 production
pool at 8:00 A.M , with the inverse procedure taking place at 8:00 P.M . The production
jobs running on dynamically shared resources were managed through the advanced
reservation capabilities of the queuing system [64], thus requiring no administrator
intervention in managing the job start or completion. These resources, unlike a sim-
ilar concept used in Condor flocking, were queue managed and reconfigured on the
fly with enhanced grid node security, NFS mounted filesystems, grid user accounts
and passwords, grid-enabled software infrastructure, and so forth and were ready to
accept production jobs without system administrator intervention. We are working
to extend this automated ACDC-Grid infrastructure to provide on-demand computa-
tional resources frommultiple IT domain-managed clusters, which can be configured
by the respective administrators using a grid service.
24.6 GRID RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS
The ACDC Grid exploits a grid-enabling template framework, which includes a
dynamically created HTML grid console for the detailed monitoring of computational
grid jobs. Results from previous studies have been used in the design of the Globus-
basedACDCGrid, which serves researchers at the Center for Computational Research
and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, located in Buffalo, NY. In
particular, the extensive framework of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAd-
min, and the Globus Toolkit provide a production-level ACDC Grid for scientific
applications and data integration as required by the applications community. The rapid
expansion of the Grid community has facilitated the ACDC-Grid collaboration with
many high-quality laboratories and testbeds for developing robust and scalable grid
infrastructure. The ACDC Grid has been hardened using grid research collaboration
memberships and participation over the past several years.
24.6.1 Grid3
The ACDC-Grid membership in the iVDGL provides access to international hetero-
geneous computing and storage resources for the purpose of experimentation in
grid-enabled data-intensive scientific computing. The ACDC-Grid team participates
in the (1) iVDGL iGOC, which is used as the central coordination point for grid tech-
nical problem resolution, (2) grid monitoring technical working group, and (3) grid
troubleshooting working group. The iVDGL and other US Grid projects have spon-
sored several Data Grid activities, including the Grid3 collaboration that has deployed